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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/15/16

The Astros may have disappointed Thursday, but they're in a prime spot for Friday against Mike Pelfrey and the Tigers.

Stacking can be a controversial topic in many daily fantasy sports, but you can count baseball as a glaring exception. Here, it's universal.

Using multiple players on the same team on a given day presents you with the opportunity to double dip. If one of your players hits an RBI double, there's a good chance he drove in another one of your guys. When you get the points for both the run and the RBI, you'll be climbing the leaderboards fast.

Each day here on numberFire, we'll go through four offenses ripe for the stacking. They could have a great matchup, be in a great park, or just have a lot of quality sticks in the lineup, but these are the offenses primed for big days that you may want a piece of.

Premium members can use our new stacking feature to customize their stacks within their optimal lineups for the day, choosing the team you want to stack and how many players you want to include. You can also check out our hitting heat map, which provides an illustration of which offenses have the best combination of matchup and potency.

Now, let's get to the stacks. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Houston Astros

Our shining pinnacle of stacking goodness last year was to target the Houston Astros when they were facing a finesse pitcher. They've got exactly that today as they go up against the Detroit Tigers' Mike Pelfrey.

There are 30 different starting pitchers hurling today, but not a single one of them had a lower strikeout rate than Pelfrey in 2015. He fanned only 12.0% of the batters he faced, and opponents made contact on 87.5% of their swings, the second-highest mark for a qualified pitcher. He does possess a high ground-ball rate, but the Astros slashed .277/.333/.478 against low-strikeout pitchers. That'll work.

Pelfrey's restrictive ground-ball rate did slip down to 47.2% against left-handed batters, pushing his xFIP all the way up to 5.22. That makes Colby Rasmus one of the top hitters on the entire slate, and the same would be true if the Astros stick any other lefties in the top two thirds of their order. I wouldn't avoid righties as Pelfrey's strikeout rate was only 12.2% against them, but lefties do receive a big bump.

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